


Learning to Be Free

by HVK



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Redemption, Rehabilitation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:29:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25687345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HVK/pseuds/HVK
Summary: On a very long-term life changing field trip with Aang going on for years now, Azula accidentally reveals to him that she doesn't know how to dance.Aang decides this is a great moment to dare her into learning something new.
Relationships: Aang/Azula (Avatar)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 91





	Learning to Be Free

Azula is a woman of immense pride, and so, it wounds her to admit that she is less than perfect in everything. She _has_ to be perfect, in everything she does; in the way she drops her words into place as neatly as the point of a blade, in the exacting movements of her Firebending forms, in the subtle methods in which she says only a few choice words to fill her enemy’s minds with doubt and uncertainty.

She has struggled long in the vicious political battlegrounds of the Fire Nation, and won out. She doubts that her brother would last long without help; he is poorly suited to intrigue. He is a more competent survivor that she had given him credit for, and his presence as Fire Lord alone has cast an unfamiliar curl of doubt that, maybe, she was wrong to assume she knew everything.

Rehabilitation, they called it as they commanded her to stay by the Avatar’s side until such time as he declared her suitable in his eyes to return home.

It’s a banishment. Yet she doesn't mind it all that much, and it’s not a comforting thought; it’s a rank feeling, a seething hot brand in the pit of her stomach. She has been cast away, her life and freedom at the mercy of an enemy who has little reason to share mercy with her, and it’s a foe she knows she has no way to defeat in a straight fight.

It should bother her more, but it does not. She doesn’t understand why. She is, however, coming to understand that perhaps she ought to watch her words around the Avatar.

He is… she’s searched for an appropriate word, and settled upon _fickle._ Or perhaps _flighty._ It’s not something that sets her entirely at ease, the way he flits from one thought to another with all the ease of a bird-cat alighting from one branch and then springing to another, or how his mood can shift from terrible graveness to sudden giggling merriment, with _none_ of the between-moods there should be.

He changes like the wind. It’s strangely exciting, in his unpredictability. She has prided herself, in the past, on being good with people, even if she must admit now that (on the balance of evidence, and time has taken the sting out of what she had considered betrayal), but she does not understand him. She does not understand his ways, or the thoughts that lead him from one idea to an apparently unrelated one.

And this brought itself to the central point: that for all her efforts to be perfect in every way, she does not actually know how to dance.

* * *

_The Avatar (and it will be a long time before she, mired in the rigid political honorifics of the Fire Nation royal courts, can dare to speak to him by his own name, and her hair prickles in alarm and shock when he persistently asks her to speak to him so familiarly) had grinned._

“ _What do you mean, you don’t_ know _?” His voice was sing-song, almost teasing; gusting this way and that, as if to push her in directions at random. She can’t get a read on him at all, and it bothers her, and he knows that it bothers her, and so he plays his strange games with her._

_Her head tilted up. “I do not know how to dance,” she replied, acidly. “You would be so very surprised to learn how it is not an essential skill in military conduct, nor the art of rulership.”_

“ _Honestly, that sounds kinda boring. Learning new things is something to look forward to, not just because it helps you!”_

_It was important to note that at the time, for no apparent reason, he was spinning on a disc of air on his hands, only looking at her for brief seconds in his revolutions._

_Her nostrils flared. “Dancing is for children and peasants who don’t have anything better to do.”_

“ _Are you just saying that because it bothers you that_ I _can dance, and my friends can dance, evne Zuko, and you don’t know how?”_

_Her silence speaks volumes. Irritable, bad tempered volumes._

_He pauses, just for a moment, staring at her head-on. He’s still upside down, but his rounded features (so disarmingly like Ty Lee that some vague suspicions of blood descent and Air leaving behind a few embers, here and there, come to mind) turn towards her, his eyes so grey they are almost translucent._

“ _So you’ve never even tried?”_

“ _Never.” She gazed into his eyes, trying to find a hint of whatever plan or plot he had in mind this time._

“ _Mm hmm.” He smiles, widening at the corner of his mouth as though he won’t be honest if it’s a grin or a challenging sneer. “It’s okay if you want to admit you can’t do it.”_

“ _What?!” She stiffened up. “I certainly can!”_

“ _No, no. It’s fine if you don’t think you can learn it at all.”_

_He has just outright challenged her. “I shall!” Her ego marches ahead of any other thought, and she’s already aware that she has gotten herself entangled in his schemes. Again. “Show me, if you dare.”_

“ _All right,” he said, leaping upwards and landing in a full standing position, and she knows now that he is most definitely grinning, holding a hand out to him._

_As she permits him to take her hand, she cannot deny an emotional flicker there, as his fingers brush across her hand._

* * *

And now, they dance.

Or rather, the Avatar dances, and she does his best to keep up, and part of her keeps thinking of it like a fight. A duel, and it seems strangely fitting.

A duel in which one fighter is a master who knows he has already won, and the other fighter is a novice, too stubborn to admit that she hadn’t the faintest idea of where to begin.

He moves so easily around her. Physical effort is second nature to her; sport games, Firebending, the many martial arts absorbed and devised by past leaders of the Fire Nation even in the days when the Fire Lord had only been leader of the Fire Sages; she knows them all, and picks them up so easily that it is as though she has done them many times over.

He moves more easily than that; he leaps across her, and as she turns to match his graceful movements (too graceful, so fluid and dynamic!), he is already facing her, bowing backwards, his feet leaving the ground and his hands catching him. Then he is spinning on both his hands, each revolution carrying him away from her.

“You’re too rigid,” he chides her. “There’s no secret formula to it. You just go with the flow and ride it!”

“Oh, is that Airbending philosophy?” Azula asks; her tone is bored, but the question is genuine.

The Air Nation is something of a blank spot in her knowledge. History books speak little about them; only that they were a military nation, bested during Sozin’s first military actions, and wiped out to the last man. And she knows that there never _was_ an Air Nation.

There had only been the Air Nomads. As a younger woman, she wouldn’t have cared much either way. But older now, and wiser, and not quite the same woman under the Avatar’s tutelage and experience of the world…

She does not know how to feel, and that vast depth before her taunts at her. But she does know they were very different from the Fire Nation, and here lies an element of their philosophy.

“It’s just how dancing works, where I’m from,” the Avatar replies, now sliding closer to her. It’s a struggle to match his movements; there is no predicting them, there is no switch from one form to another, just a chaotic and ever-shifting flow of limbs and body, and she cannot outpace it, only match it. He grins. “So, you’re not wrong!”

She understands something, then. The thought has been working beneath the surface, chipping away and puzzling over it.

She knows the essence of fire is power; Zuko has spoken of drive and energy, and she still does not quite understand what that means. She knows other Bending forms draw power from other aspects of human nature and thought, and she finally understands that Airbending _is_ freedom.

Fire burns hotter with anger, with drive and aggression. But as he allows himself to be free, to be detached from the tethers around him, he flies; the air around him buoys him upwards, or erupts around him, uncontrolled and truly free, destructive beyond measure or completely harmless without any apparent pattern.

She understands him a bit better, she thinks.

And then he leans in, his hand just below her own.

“A dance between two people is a partnership,” he says mischievously. “It’s not a battle you win. It’s something you _do,_ together.”

Her hand moves, almost on its own, and pauses just below it, nearly ready to grasp his hand.

She hesitates.

She killed him once, she remembers. So why does he make her nervous?

He smiles at her, fearlessly, calmly, as though he is above petty things like grudges or memories of war. His eyes lock with her own, and she’s rarely seen someone so forthright with her, especially not a boy in her age range.

She’s never had peers, she thinks. Only soldiers and subordinates; never _real_ friends, not anyone that pursued her company of their own accord, as he had when he had suggested this in the early days of her rehabilitation.

His hand is still proffered to her. She’s never known anyone who _wanted_ to hold her hand.

And there is a feeling like electricity between his hand, and her own; a simmering tension, a feeling that she must either run away now before he changes his mind, or grasp and _never let go_ -

Her fingers seize his hand, and he squeezes back.

He moves. “Follow my lead,” he says, head tilting up to look into her eyes, and she silently follows.

And, in that moment, it is _freeing_ to simply move in that dance, without worrying about appearances, to let the wind carry her.

And his hand feels warm and soft in her grip. She has known power and authority, dominance and security. She has not known kindness.

She thinks she would like to know it a little better now.


End file.
